Lauren Reed led the first Rethinking Rigor workshop for Ballet Unboxed in 2024. That day, we brainstormed together, poster paper on the wall, about what our past and present relationships to rigor looked like. Then we reimagined it. What could a rigorous ballet class look and feel like if we expanded our definition? Participants named things like attention to breath, viewing the room as if filming a documentary, and noticing the quality of their gaze. And then we danced about it. Lauren brought in a juicy ground-movement combination designed to make the body feel warm and loose, followed by a short but sweet center ballet phrase. What stayed with me most was the discussion and the openness with which she held space for it. She came in with a plan, but she let the energy of the room guide us somewhere else entirely.

I sat down with Lauren recently to talk about what has shifted for her since then, what rigor means to her now, and what she is bringing to Ballet Unboxed 2026.

On the Edge of Something

Since the first workshop, Lauren's relationship with ballet has been evolving. For a long time, teaching dance to kids on a weekly basis has been her most consistent engagement with ballet. As of this year, she is stepping away from that.

My relationship with ballet is about to change again.

Lauren described how teaching shaped the way she experienced taking classes for herself. She would often think of her students while she was dancing. Not that she was planning combinations, but noticing the things she had been adamant about in her own teaching. If she had been drilling a particular foundational movement with her students, she would make sure to execute it herself when the moment came.

I would imagine my students watching me, because if I'm making them do it, I better show them that I can do it.

Something is revealing about that: the way teaching feeds back into your own practice. As Lauren put it, the stuff that you talk about with ballet becomes the stuff that you think about, and then the stuff that you do. Without that consistent teaching, something will shift. She does not know exactly what yet, but she is curious.

Absolutes and Nuance

Lauren grew up at a competition dance studio and has taught at competition studios for years. She recognizes the value of clarity in teaching young dancers—sometimes you need to simplify and lose a little nuance on purpose in order to teach one thing at a time. She does not think that is a bad thing. But she also sees what can happen when that simplification becomes the whole picture.

Sometimes in the effort to make something so clear for children, it's really easy to create these absolutes. If your knees are even a teeny bit bent, then they're not straight. If you're not all the way down your splits, it's not your splits.

These hyper-tangible metrics—leg height, degree of turnout, whether you are sweating—offer something concrete to hold onto. But they ignore body differences and leave no room for interpretation.

When you learn something so young, it becomes ingrained and sometimes it becomes an unquestioned habit, or the truth, or the only way that's possible.

The problem is not the metrics themselves. It is when they are the only metrics. Lauren spoke about how young dancers often have a hard time embracing nuance or the lack of absolutes.

A lot of people haven't been trained to find other metrics, to use other metrics, and then to discover which metrics are actually important to you.

I relate to this deeply. Teaching has humbled my own relationship with perfection. I find myself less attached to doing everything and more interested in what happens when I focus on just one thing. Maybe my pelvis is not touching the floor in the split, but maybe my knees are stretched—and that is what success looks like for the day.

The Fifth Position

Lauren shared a story that felt like a perfect example of rethinking rigor in practice. A couple of years ago, she started doing everything from first position in ballet class. Her hip socket clunks when she does a tendu devant—it feels, she says, like her hip is coming out of its socket every time. She has gotten through “a whole lot of ballet with that happening and been okay”. But as she developed more awareness, she decided she did not like that feeling anymore.

I went through a phase where I was taking a decent amount of ballet class, but I was doing everything from first.

For a while, she thought this might be permanent.

Maybe this is me forever. Maybe I never do fifth position ever again.

She talked to another educator, Laura Wade, about the hip issue. Laura suggested going from third. Lauren's response was immediate: "If Laura Wade says I can do it, then I have permission." She laughed about it—the instinct to seek permission, even as a professional.

Then, this year, she went back to fifth. Not because someone told her to, but because she was ready.

I went into class one day and I was like, I'm kind of ready to sweat today. I'm kind of ready to grind a little bit. There wasn't somebody saying, hey, you really can't do third—you have to do fifth. It was a choice that I made.

What Are You Moving Towards?

At its core, the question Lauren keeps returning to is about striving without punishment. What does it look like to work toward something in ballet without feeling like you have lost if you do not reach it?

What are things that you can focus on in ballet that might not be so tied to ideas of perfection or achieving an ideal, but that are still having you strive towards something, but not in a way that feels punitive if you don't reach it?

Lauren and I talked about the shift that happens when you allow yourself to care about fewer things in a given class—not out of apathy, but out of intentionality. You know the other things exist. You are choosing to set them aside for now to be fully present with the one thing.

When you let some things go, then you can really focus on one thing. It makes that one thing so loud in a way that's really fun. It shines a light on it and you're able to really zoom in and see.

This connects to what Lauren said about rigor not being purely quantitative. Working hard is not just about how many times you can get something right. It is also qualitative and subjective—not always visible from the outside, sometimes just felt.

The Values of a Form

In the second part of our conversation, I asked Lauren about the future of Ballet. We talked about something Lauren's students had asked her: why don't we do ballet improv?

Lauren teaches tap, jazz, lyrical, and other forms, where she emphasizes improvisation. But when it comes to ballet, she did not have a better answer than: it is just kind of not a thing. That led us into a conversation about why, about autonomy, and about the values that ballet as a form has historically communicated.

Lauren has a practice with her students, particularly those who have not been exposed to many dance forms, of showing videos of other styles and asking them not whether it is good or bad, but what they see.

Based on looking at this dance, what do you think the values are of this dance? What do you see that they are trying to achieve?

She finds that when students apply the values of the form they know to a form they do not, the gap becomes visible. They might say a tap dancer's arms are not clean—but in tap, arms are often functional and maybe not decorative. Getting kids to guess what the values of another form might be, rather than judging from their existing framework, is a way of starting from a new place.

Lauren applies the same question back to ballet. If improvisation has not historically been a communicated value, what values have been communicated? And how fixed are they?

What are the values of this form? And how rigid are those values? Or is there some wiggle room in there?

When we talked about what it might look like to improvise within ballet vocabulary, Lauren offered something that stuck with me: there is no right or wrong. There is just clear or unclear. The choice is yours.

Join Lauren at Constellation

Lauren is returning to lead Rethinking Rigor as part of Ballet Unboxed 2026. The workshop will include facilitated discussion, guided reflection, journaling, and, of course, movement with a focus on expanding curiosity and sensitivity within familiar steps.

This is a workshop that depends on who is in the room. As Lauren put it, "It has to be crowdsourced." The ideas, the questions, and the reimagining come from the participants as much as from the facilitator.

Sunday, June 15, 12:15 to 3:15pm at Constellation (Studio A). This workshop is free and open to the public.

We hope to see you there!